Hybrid Luminous Soma Land (decoloninzing nature in us)
Andrea Haenggi
Sunday
16:00 - 17:30
ONLINE
Workshop
Hybrid Luminous Soma Land
This multispecies somatic movement session is grounded and guided by the teachings of urban moss, one of the most ancient plants to make the leap from water to land. The group will search for the “luminous green color” of hydrated moss through prompts using touch, sensation, imagination and memory. The more-than-human-being ancestors in our cells will find their way to the surface. The group will spend time listening, unraveling, and sharing their somatic "land" stories with movement, dance, drawing and writing. You will be asked to move and rest with the body, to follow sensory immediacy to nourish moss’s ability to thrive in slow communities with no beginning or end.
Hybrid Luminous Soma Land calls into question our relation to nature with our cultural, religious and political upbringing, asking for unlearning to (re)build hybrid future beings. This workshop centers multispecies beings, ancestral wisdom, and the body as nature.
This is a hybrid session that allows paricpants to join either live in the studio, or online.
Andrea Haenggi is an artist, dancer and choreographer of Swiss alpine descent, living on occupied Lenapehoking land currently known as New York City. Calling on plants as guides, teachers, mentors and performers, her dance and somatic fieldwork practice creates a form of theater called Ethnochoreobotanography, which simultaneously explores issues regarding decolonization, ecology, feminism, power, labor and care. She teaches, performs and exhibits internationally. Her most recent teaching practice, called Moss in Pandemic Times, was a regular Zoom somatic practice to find relations to urban moss and their teachings and climaxed in a participatory socially distanced performance in the East River Park (NYC) and an online collaborative project Moss Summer Camp for eco-social justice. Her latest relational residencies as an “embodied scientist” were at Wave Hill, Bronx, NY (2020) and at the Botanical Garden of the University of Zurich, Switzerland (2019). andrea holds an MFA in Creative Practice from Transart Institute/Plymouth University UK, is a Swiss Canton Solothurn Dance Prize recipient, and is on the faculty of LIMS in NYC. She is the co-founder of the artist collective Environmental Performance Agency (EPA), whose primary goal is to shift thinking around the terms environment, performance, and agency through somatic approaches.
environmentalperformanceagency.com weedychoreography.com